Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
DR. WILLIAM KELLY: Welcome to episode 11 of Irish Writers in
America, CUNY TV's 13-part series featuring Irish and
Irish-American writers. This week, we meet two emerging
novelists. Kevin Barry, a writer of short stories and novels,
is perhaps best known as the author of "The City of
Bohane"- a novel that imagines a violent,
dystopian future in a fictional city on the west
coast of Ireland.
The book won the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin
Literary Award, and brought increased
attention to the Limerick-born, Barry.
Mary Beth Keane is the author of "The Walking
People" and "Fever", and was named one of the
National Book Foundation's "Five Under 35".
In "Fever", Keane explores the fate of an Irish
immigrant forced to live in confinement on an
island off the coast of Manhattan,
the story of Mary Mallon, known to most as "Typhoid Mary".
KEVIN BARRY: No, I'm a megalomaniac and an
egomaniac, and I've always expected utter global
domination to arrive at my feet.
So, the only thing that puzzled me was that it
took so long to come true.
♪ [Theme Music] ♪
KEVIN BARRY: My kind of ideal experience for the
reader, if you like, is to laugh all the way through
the story, and then at the end go,
"What in the name of Hell are we laughing at there",
you know?
That's what I want the reader to feel.
My first book of stories came out in Ireland in
2007 with a small independent press in
Dublin called "The Stinging Fly".
I've just recently published a book of
stories in Ireland and in the UK called "Dark Lies
the Island" And my first novel came out in Europe
last year, "City of Bohane" and it's "Bohan"
not "Bohayn" in case anybody gets that wrong.
We're given to feuds in Irish history.
Feuds are nothing new, so for sure,
you could trace all the grievances in Bohane back
to older grievances as well.
But I also wanted it to exist as its own world and
its own place, without necessarily having these
strings pulling it out there.
But I think any book that's worth it's salt,
you can read in different ways with references to
the world that's there, our own world and other
tangents that might come away from that.
Ireland is a very small island- a wet,
tormented, little rock on the edge of the Black
Atlantic- and there are lots and lots and lots and
lots of Irish writers.
And you can like -- you throw a stick at Ireland,
and you hit a poet over the head or a playwright
or somebody.
So, when you're emerging as a writer now,
you can sometimes feel, "Oh God,
it's all been done", you know?
"It's all been done to death." But the more you
look around, you find actually that there are
whole swaths of Irish society that have never
been committed to paper.
For example, the working class speech of cities
like Limerick and Cork and Galway have very,
very rarely appeared between book covers;
and it's not for any particularly sinister reason.
It's just that those communities weren't in the
way of producing books.
You know, so there's actually a whole really
interesting sort of stream of Irish talk that's never
been done, that's never been caught, I think.
So, the talk, the conversation of the City
of Bohane would very recognizable to anybody
who knows the talk of Cork City or Limerick City,
and the way the young and that those who fancied
themselves as poor would talk in those cities.
I mean, the "City of Bohane" has lots of
things, but what it is ultimately,
it's a projection of what homicidal teenage hipsters
might sound like in such an Irish city in the
middle of the century.
As such, it was great fun to write.
It's a belated discovery, Mick,
as a writer, that you should be having fun.
You should be having a good time.
It shouldn't be like the bio-pick version of a
writer's life where you're battering your head off
the wall and crunching up the page and throwing it
to the bin, you know?
You should be laughing and you should be having a
hell -- you should be having a really good time in there.
Because if you're not having a good time,
the chances are, the reader is not going to
have a good time down the line.
I had a great time writing "City of Bohane" to the
point that I'd probably be tempted to head for that
dark, malevolent city again at some point.
Most stories will go wrong on you at some point, you know?
I always think it feels a little bit like a
tightrope walk- a short story- and every sentence
is a step along the line, and you can fall off and
break your neck at any minute,
and you'll never get the story back.
They're especially difficult,
for some reason, because it's such a concentrated
space you're trying to get your information and your
story into; and even one kind of off sentence can
throw it all out of kilter, I think.
I mean, when I'm writing a story,
I'm thinking of the reader when they're reading a
story, and I want the reader to be -- almost feel
like there's no air in the room,
and to feel like they have to sit up a little
straighter in the chair, turn the radio down,
because they're really in this world.
It should be a very intense experience
to read a short story,
and I think a very slow experience.
So, I want to put that intensity into the writing
as well, to make sure that I get that at the far end,
if you like, of the process.
I think in an odd way, at the moment it's a good
time to be writing short stories and books of
stories, because the internet has melted all of
our brains, and we have been reduced to the
attention spans of little frogs.
Now, I know that a lot of people are struggling with novels.
Friends of mine, who I would have had discussions
all the time with about novels,
aren't reading novels so much, you know?
And it's because we're constantly online now,
and we're there all the time in that online space;
and when you are there, it creates a kind of
congenital impatience, I think.
You flit- you're on Twitter,
you're on Facebook, you're on your email and back again.
You're doing this, and you're flitting all the
time, and it's very difficult then to go into
that quieter immersive world where you're in a
novel, and people are struggling with it.
But they still want to read books.
So, in a kind of weird, kind of sad way,
I think there is a moment for the short story,
and it could be a really interesting form over the
next while.
One thing that really bothers me and annoys me
about short story writers is that very often you'll
see in a writer's career, they emerge with a book of
stories; and then they just go on to publish
novel after novel after novel.
And I think, "No, no, no, keep going at the
stories", you know?
Because it's a really difficult craft,
and it's a lifelong craft.
And I think it's so surprised that the
greatest short stories out there,
people like William Trevor,
people like Alice Monroe, are the people that keep
going at stories, and who keep writing stories all
the way through their career.
It's kind of my first love,
the short stories form, and I'm very devoted to it.
I'll always do both. I will do novels,
but I'll always go back to the story as well.
When I have an idea, if I'm lucky enough to have
notion someday, always my first impulse is not to
try and expand it out to something longer,
but to see if I can reduce it down and get it into
the space of a short story.
I think most stories can be told quickly.
I hate the term "literary fiction".
It summons up something serious,
and, you know, so I really admire the work that's
been done in the areas that persist in calling
the genres.
I love crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy.
It's great stuff out there,
and it's nice to pull different elements from
everywhere, and mash them all up and see what you can make.
And I think it's important that writers,
novelists try new things all the time.
The Irish writer Julian Gough, recently I was talking to him.
He said if a novel is not being novel,
it's not a novel.
You have to try new stuff all the time.
Because I think the novel is 300 years old,
and it's very weary and it's very tired;
and you know, not a great deal new has been done in
the novel form in the last while.
So, I think it really beholds writers to try new
things and try to bring new influences in from
everywhere, and see what you can do with it,
you know?
It is a wonderfully open forum to new things,
if you just try them.
I mean, it's very important for me,
as a writer, to take risks and not to just find a
formula that works for my books and keep going with
that; but to chance things and take risks.
Sometimes you know that the story is going to fall
out of your hands and smash on the floor,
but try it and see what happens.
That way, it keeps it interesting for me as
well, you know?
I don't want to get bored.
There's another thing you discover when you've been
writing fiction all the time for a while.
I've been at it quite a while now,
and it becomes less the thing you do,
and more the thing you are. It sounds vaguely disgusting,
but it becomes like a bodily function.
You don't feel good about yourself if you don't do it.
So, I go to the desk seven days a week,
and I'm there for three or four hours every morning.
In the average week, there's only one or two
days where it'll seem like it's going well,
where's there a sense of flow.
But you realize that you have to be there for the
slow days where you're slamming your head off the
wall, to make the good ones;
because so much of writing burbles in the subconscious.
It comes from the back of the mind.
So, you kind of make this pact with yourself that
you're going to be there and you're going to be
available if it sends you anything,
if it sends you stories and ideas. I enjoy reading the
work a lot. I'm kind of a frustrated actor.
It's actually a really important part of my craft
in writing as well. I read the stuff out aloud,
and I will act it out all the time because I always
think that the ear will pick up the false notes in
your work quicker than the eye will.
It's really useful for the writer.
So, it might look and sound a bit crazed to a
casual observer as I pace up and down the room
screaming and roaring and doing all the voices,
but it works for me to operate that way.
"Bohane builds sausages and Bohane builds beer.
We exist in the high fifties of latitude,
after all, the winters are fierce,
and we need the inner fire that comes from a meat
diet and voluminous drinking.
The plants worked all angles of the clock,
and after the night shift, it was the custom to make
for 'S' Town and a brief revel.
In the dawn haze, the brewery lads were
dreamy-eyed from hops fume,
while the slaughterhouse boys have been all the
silver and shade of night -- up to their oxters in
the corpses of beasts, filling the wagons for the
butcher's slabs at the arcade market in the
Trace, and the wagons rolled out now across the
greasy cobbles, and it was a gory cargo they hauled.
See the peeled heads of sheep,
the vein fleshy haunches of pigs,
the glistening trays of livers and spleens,
skirts and kidneys, lungs and tongues.
Carnivorous to a fault, we ate the whole lot for you
out in Bohane." I think for Irish writers in the
20th century, you had to -- do you go with the Joyce,
Joycean School, and put everything in;
or do you go with the Beckett approach,
and take everything back out;
or do you go with the Flann O'Brien approach,
which is to kind of skew it all,
and take a more satirical slant.
I'm a bit of a Flann man, of the three greats when
it comes down to it.
And I love that satirical skewed,
demented tradition in Irish literature that goes
back to Flann and back beyond to Lawrence Sterne
and to Jonathan Swift.
I love that kind of dangerous,
playful, nasty stream and streak in Irish writing.
And if I wanted to belong to any strand of it,
it will be there; but I'm not nationalistic about my
work, you know?
I'm just going in there and making my worlds.
Of course, you know, Ireland is in every
sentence and phrase I write,
but it's not on a conscious level really, you know?
It's important that you don't try and just up it,
and play it up, and anyway.
MARY BETH KEANE: I was born in the Bronx.
I wanted to be a writer since I was about eight.
I remember that we had a creative writing exercise
in class and I wrote something about a baked potato.
They asked me- I was sort of a chubby,
you know, eight-year-old, so then they asked me read
it out loud in front of the class,
which was mortifying.
But then I realized, "This is actually pretty good",
and I enjoyed that. I will never forget that.
"Walking People" is the literal translation of the
Irish word for "traveler"; and the more I thought
about my book and my story,
you know, personally I thought about the Irish
people beyond travelers, and how they're all really
travelers, whether it's a capital "T" or a lower case.
They were people we always saw when we went there to
visit, and they'd be in groups by the side of the road.
In the beginning, when we were young,
they'd still have caravans, they still tented.
You know, they lived very much outside.
I would ask my parents, "What is this?
Are they homeless?" You know, being from New York,
I knew what a homeless
person was, but it didn't quite make sense to me;
and they did not explain this sufficiently.
"They were just travelers".
So, I'd say, "What does that mean? Where do they live?
Why don't they want to live in a house,
you know, live in inside?" My parents,
they just didn't really explain it,
and so I kept trying to answer that question,
you know, again, for a really long time.
They're really an interesting people.
I mean, the difference between the travelers,
capital "T" and travelers like my parents,
is that the travelers, capital "T",
they want to be moving.
You know, they want to be always in a different place.
As far as I understand, they want to be of the
earth and of the world and live in a certain way.
People like my father, or other people who had to
leave, they didn't want to leave,
and they had to.
So, there's a difference between coming to New York
as a person, you know, as an Irish in 2007,
who wants to come and live in Manhattan and,
you know, earn a little money and spend a little
money; there's a big difference between that
Irish person and people of my father's generation who
came because there was just absolutely no work.
There was no way to live in the place that they were.
So, they're sort of travelers despite themselves;
you know, despite, I think, what they wanted to be.
I'm sure if there had been opportunities- well,
I'm not sure, but I imagine,
if there had been more opportunities in the
sixties and seventies, more people would have stayed.
But, you know, they couldn't stay,
so they came here and made a life.
Now they have children with American accents and
we're writing books about them.
So, when I'd go to Galway or Mayo as a kid,
and strangers would say to me,
or to my sisters, "Welcome home";
you know, it was very moving,
but it also just made me always think about what,
you know, home meant.
In New York, as the child of Irish parents,
I always felt like I had a foot in both worlds.
There, I am, for sure, 100 percent American,
in every way, especially in the eighties and the
early nineties, you know, the clothes I wore,
the way I spoke and things I had.
But here, I was very much identified as an Irish
person; and compared to people in my high school
or in especially college, I was very,
very Irish; and I didn't realize really what that meant.
You know, I feel like I'm constantly defining what
that means, and that's sort of where that
book came from.
My parents came from the west of Ireland around the
same time that those characters came,
and it's just something I had been thinking about
since I was really young.
How you can be a person from New York and feel
fully of a place where every person you've been
related to before that, you know,
in your lineage, was from somewhere else.
So, I think of my father and mother as the end,
in a way, of a very, very long line of people.
Especially where my father's from,
it's more remote than where my mother's from.
Then, that decision to one day get up and leave,
and it's just something I've been thinking about,
I think, my whole life. So, I really just,
being a fiction writer, you have to be a good listener;
and I listened all the time,
and I was able to use everything I pictured
throughout my whole life, in this book.
My father worked as a sandhog for 35 years,
and it's an occupation that's always been
interesting to me.
I pictured my dad going down into the tunnels,
and they're very deep.
They're much, much further down than subway tunnels.
That was scary to me, as a kid.
There'd be occasional PBS specials on being a
sandhog, and they were terrifying;
and we would watch as a family,
because my dad would want to see if he knew anyone,
and maybe not realizing that the content would be
terrifying for, you know, young daughters.
This is one example of a type of work that is
occurring all the time around us,
that nobody notices really or appreciates.
Because my parents came, not unwillingly but
because they had to, I felt like they always
tried to create Ireland at home.
So, it was as if Ireland in the 1960s was my house
in 1988, you know, and 1992.
So, what that meant to go from a very rural
beautiful place where there was very little,
to New York City to becoming a tunnel worker,
to having kids who end up going to college and grad
school and all these things. So that conflict,
I feel like that's the book I'd been thinking about my
whole life- and then I just wrote it.
Writing "Fever" was different than writing
"The Walking People" in that "Fever" is about a
real person, and I had to keep certain aspects of
her life, Mary Mallon's life, intact.
That was like writing with shackles,
it was like writing with a weight around my neck
because I couldn't just let the fiction go where
it wanted to go.
It sort of felt like writing with an outline,
which I don't like to do.
So, I tried to focus on the years where Mary went
off the radar, in order to feel as if it's completely
mine to do what I want with.
But then the times when I had to go back to the
actual history, it felt like a different type of writing.
You know, there's a bigger burden on it, I suppose.
The research part for a fiction writer is very strange.
I tried to research and read as much as I could,
and then almost forget about it at the same time;
and that was a big difference between my
first novel and my second novel.
Well, first I thought she was a fictional character,
like a lot of people do.
I saw a documentary- this was probably in 2005 or
2006 and I decided to read Judith Walzer Leavitt's
book on Typhoid Mary.
She became even more interesting to me,
because she was so young when she was taken from
her employment -and put in isolation.
She was Irish, she was a cook,
which is something, it's a type of work I feel I understand.
I think I'm more comfortable writing about
a cook in 1906 than, you know, a hedge fund manager in 2012.
That kind of dignity in work that I felt from her,
you know, reading about her as she was interpreted
by other people, was something I liked and
identified with.
As a character, she's both the victim and a villain,
and I liked how complicated she was.
Everything I read about her was interpreted by
other people- how she felt, what she wanted.
These were things that were written about her by
lawyers and doctors and department of health
people, and they were all of a different class than
she was, a different education level,
and they assumed things about her and her point of
view that I felt in 2008, I guess,
when I started this, my back went up.
I didn't know why they would assume those things,
and so it started to feel like a responsibility to
give her a voice.
There was an assumption, I think,
that as an Irish person, that she was not capable
of understanding the danger she posed to other
people, that she couldn't understand the medical
advances of the time, that she was stubborn,
that she was thick-headed.
You know, a lot of characteristics that were
associated with the Irish people.
There were a few things that worked against her
that I think now would hopefully be irrelevant.
She was single, but she occasionally lived with a
man when she was between situations,
to whom she wasn't married,
and that was held against her.
She was female, but she was not only female,
but she seemed perfectly happy and strong.
She wasn't cowed by men.
I think when people talk about her- especially at
the time- it was as if, you know,
every cook, every laundress,
everybody wants to be the lady of the house,
but they can't.
And Mary, I always got the sense,
didn't want to be the lady of the house.
She didn't want to be the wife organizing the
dinners and taking care of the kids.
She wanted to be cooking and earning money,
and, you know, visiting her man every third or
fourth week, and that's that.
I really liked that about her.
I mean, I really was reading between the lines
to find my character, but that's the impression I
got, and that's what made me really like her.
Did she know what she was doing,
especially when she went back to cook at Sloan
Maternity under a false name?
I think it's possible that we can,
as human beings, know things about ourselves and
not know them at the same time.
I think she's a good person who was just
declining to know inconvenient information
about herself, and I think we do this all the time.
We just close the door on ugly things that are possibilities.
Actually I read quite a bit about the years early
in the AIDs epidemic, and how people dealt with
information about themselves,
and it was the same.
You know, that patient zero,
how that must have felt to be presented with this
news, that people are getting sick and you're responsible.
I think any one of us, when we're told that,
and we feel healthy and good and strong and young,
would say, "You're nuts.
I'm just going to continue doing what I'm doing,
because I love my life." I really sympathize with
that, you know, while at the same time,
thinking it's terrible to go into a maternity
hospital and cook under a false name.
But that's what made her so interesting.
If she were a straight up villain or a straight up
victim, I wouldn't have written the book.
I am protective of her.
I feel like I know her really well,
but this is my fictional Mary.
I have no idea if the real Mary would bear any
resemblance to the Mary I created;
but I think to write fiction and be with
something for at its most bloated form,
400 pages, and then now it's like a trim 350,
I think there's no way to do that well if you don't
have affection and sympathy for even your
most terrible, despicable characters.
Being Irish, especially in the United States,
is something I feel that we're always reminding
each other of.
You know, this is the way we do things because we're Irish.
I wonder sometimes if there's more reflection on
being Irish because we're here,
than if we were still there.
I think Irishness is what's happening at home
in your kitchen- you know, the things you eat,
the things you talk about, the things you focus on.
I think it's something related to family and
blood and the way you all interact with each other.
To be an Irish writer, identify myself as one,
is to set the bar really high, I think.
You know, I started reading Irish literature.
You know, you start with Ulysses and Beckitt,
and your mom is reading you Yates,
you know, as a kid.
I think that starts things,
and then you start seeking out,
you know, Roddy Doyle, and the more contemporary
Irish writers, and it goes from there.
I mean, I don't only read Irish literature,
but I'm an Irish person that's certain,
and I'm a writer.
So, I'm an Irish writer.
READING: Somehow, the more she talked about it, the further
away home seemed to both of them. For Greta, home was
not a place that co-existed with America. A place that went on
and grew and changed at the same time New York was growing
and changing. It felt more like Ireland had ended where
America began, as if it was something out of Americas
past. Even the children had caught on, saying the word
home to eachother, but meaning Ireland a place they'd never
seen. They don't have pizza at home do they Mom? James had
asked on his seventh birthday. He held the slice at angle so
that the oil formed a current down the center, leaked onto
the plate, and made the thin paper almost transparent.
No love, Greta told him. They have delicious pigs feet.